Are you proposing the use of a profile of HTML, which requires the <html>
prefix and permits only the use of the <p>, <pre> and <br> tags?
something like that. maybe without the <html> prefix.
and maybe not an enforced profile, just a set of conventions for
generating recipient-friendly HTML (instead of multipart/alternative)
We could encourage senders to stay within the recipient-friendly subset,
and encourage readers to be able to render the recipient-friendly subset
even if they can't do full HTML.
That's equivalent to creating a new markup language in my book, something
which I believe would be even less successful than text/enriched.
Given that HTML is already supported by a large number of user agents,
I'm not sure why this should be the case.
One certainly can't re-use the text/html label for such a profile as there
are deployed clients which deliberately don't display text/html to the user
because it's almost always unreadable (I'm using one such client).
Surely this is configurable?
The impression I'm getting is that HTML has suffered from what I think
of as "ASN.1 disease" (though it could equally apply to a number of other
things): If a technology has a lot more features than is needed to do a
particular job, those features get used whether they're needed or not.
The results tend to be so ugly that people are biased against any use
of the technology, even when such use is reasonable and appropriate.
Keith